U.S. public education has a long relationship with pursuing high standards for students, teachers, and schools, reaching back to the Committee of Ten in the 1890s proposing a uniform curriculum for college-bound students. Advocates of child-centered education, such as psychologist G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) challenged establishing standards and core courses (such as English and math); however, eventually the business model of efficiency based on standardized goals and test-based accountability won the debate. American schools were destined for decades of policies designed to raise standards and increase test scores.
Monthly Archives: March 2013
“The Poor Are Too Free?:” Unlocking the Middle-Class Code
Test-Based Accountability, International Comparisons, Standards-mania: Lessons Ignored – @ the chalk face
Argue with Some of the Logic?: The Expertise Gap – @ the chalk face
More on the Culture of Control
In my review of Kathleen Nolan’s book on zero tolerance policies in urban schools, I focused on the “culture of control”:
The students in this urban high school are situated in their lives and the school, both of which are permeated by the police gaze and messages about these teens as criminals. Nolan shows that a culture of control in the school creates a reciprocal dynamic in which all people in that culture embrace and perpetuate behaviors in the students that trap them in a continual state of penal control.
Former educator and professor, currently blogging at Education Week, Walt Gardner raised a concern about my review in an email:
I’m a bit more sympathetic about a principal’s job today than I was when I retired in 1992. I attribute the change to the shootings at so many schools. That’s why I’m wondering if the “culture of control” that you correctly describe is not unavoidable. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need police on campus or metal detectors. But I don’t see how they can be avoided. Principals and districts would be held liable if they did NOT take such precautions.
I have received other similar comments, directly about the review but often in response to many of my pieces rejecting the discipline policies in “no excuses” charter schools; thus, I think a few points need to be clarified.
First, let me offer some context.
One day in the first few years of my 18 years as a public school English teacher in the rural South, I walked past the study hall during my planning period. The lunchroom served as the study hall and was filled with two or three classes of students, monitored by one woman who worked as an aid.
It took me a second to realize that the students were all gathered around a fight. I rushed in to find two boys on the ground, the floor swirled in blood. I managed to separate the two boys, one of which had apparently struck the other in the nose with a pair of brass knuckles. Later that day, I arrived at home with my button-down collar shirt and dress pants splattered with blood.
Several years later, as I discussed after the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, I bumped into a student gunman just outside my classroom door.
I have lived and worked in the realities of school violence, and I do not take school safety lightly, as a teacher or a parent.
Further, I have spent a great deal of scholarly and public writing confronting the current reform movement that claims schools alone can change society; thus, I am not being a hypocrite about the potential for schools alone to overcome the violence and crime of the communities surrounding far too many urban schools.
In fact, my argument about school academic and discipline reform is the same: Social reform addressing inequity must come first in order to support school reform, but school policies must guard against mirroring and perpetuating social inequity.
And it is at that second part that I reject zero tolerance and “no excuses” policies that institutionalize school-to-prison pipelines and create schools-as-prisons.
Arguments for authoritarian school policies—such as police in the hallways, metal detectors, and one-strike-you’re-out expulsion triggers—often rest on a false either/or choice between anarchy and lock-down. Further, many calls for zero tolerance and “no excuses” practices are masks for racism and deficit views of class and children (see Ta-Nehihi Coates about the racism we tend to skirt or mask with “It’s socio-economic, not race”).
Let me be clear: All children deserve to be safe in their lives and their schools. Period.
And it is both a legal and moral obligation for adults to seek that safety.
But extreme policies that turn schools into prisons are fatalistic, ensuring that children come to see themselves as not potential criminals (which is inexcusable itself) but as criminals.
We must confront that school discipline policies are powerful harbingers of America’s judicial system: Pre-kindergarten expulsions predict the gender and race inequity found in the U.S. judicial and prison systems in which males are disproportionately punished and imprisoned and in which African American males are even more greatly over-represented in both school punishments and incarceration.
My concern is not trapped in an ideal world, and I reject entirely that schools-as-prisons are unavoidable [1].
I also contend that treating students with dignity and respect by rising above the racism and classism of society is not just a desirable goal but something we can achieve.
And nothing about treating students with dignity and respect, nothing about creating a school environment free of racism and classism prevents us from also creating schools that are safe.
[1] For one snapshot of that possibility, consider the documentary Heart of Stone.
Looking at Wrong Outcomes, Missing the Lesson
The College Board has a recent history of recreating itself, notably the cyclical revision of the SAT and now a move to resurrect the Advanced Placement (AP) program.
While I am no fan of the College Board, specifically the problems related to the SAT, I taught most of my nearly two decades as a high school English teacher in a rural South Carolina public school either preparing my students for AP English courses (“advanced” feeder courses leading to Literature and Composition or Language and Composition) or teaching AP Literature and Composition.
Setting aside for a moment the conflicts of interest and disturbing self-promotion behind the College Board revamping AP courses on the heels of David Coleman turning his Common Core State Standards (CCSS) gig into being named president of College Board, consider Jack Schneider’s challenge to the new AP plan, which builds to this central criticism:
Evidence to the contrary, however, is all around us. Look, for instance, at Mississippi, which has the lowest average household income in the U.S. and the highest percentage of African-American residents. Given the way that educational resources are distributed, it should come as no surprise that nearly half of students taking AP exams in the state scored a 1 out of 5. Only four percent of students scored a 5. These are not the kinds of problems that the AP Program can solve.
In order to consider both the credibility of the College Board’s plan to reform their AP programs and Scheider’s critique, I want to focus first on a teacher story of mine, building on a key point made by Brian Jones about the inherent failure of CCSS and those who advocate for yet another standards and testing cycle:
I heard a woman who’s been involved with high-level education policy discussions defend the Common Core’s de-emphasis of personal narratives because, she argued, that’s not the kind of writing people need to do in college. At the end of her presentation, a teacher who opposed the Common Core standards asked her if she, as a teacher, could really do anything to influence policy. This same woman told her that the most powerful thing a teacher could do to influence policy would be to speak to lawmakers directly and tell a story — tell a specific story about how these policies affect her classroom. Without realizing it, she argued that personal narratives were not important for “college and career readiness”, but if you are setting out to change the world, personal narratives are the most powerful thing you’ve got [emphasis added].
If we let the corporations organize education, it will be an education that’s about fitting our children into their workplaces — into the narrow vision of working life that they have in store for the next generation.
As I noted above, I taught throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the same rural Upstate SC high school that I had attended in the 1970s. During my years as a student in that school, no AP courses were offered, but during my college years, my former high school English teacher and mentor, Lynn Harrill, brought AP to the school.
In 1984, I assumed not only Lynn’s position in the English department but also his room. While it would take several years for me to earn the role of teaching in the AP program Lynn built, I eventually taught the feeder sophomore course into the program before later teaching AP Literature and Composition; I also as department chair added AP Language and Composition (taught by a colleague).
This high school included only about 750-900 students while I taught there and served a relatively high-poverty population of students. If anyone had chosen to judge the success of our AP program as Schneider has—focusing on AP test scores, outcomes—that most students over the years scored 2s and 1s would likely paint a picture of failure.
Charts of the data over the years ignore some genuinely important facts about whether of not AP was successful at my high school, including whether or not that failure or success was directly caused by the AP program itself.
First, what the data do not tell you is that we did not gate-keep students as the College Board recommended; we didn’t use PSAT scores in order to weed out only the best and the brightest. In fact, a neighboring high school with triple our student body size routinely had about the same total number of AP students as I taught.
The policy of our AP program was providing access to high-quality courses for as many students as possible, not test-score outcomes.
Next, since the administration was committed to increasing student access to AP, they were also committed to supporting me as a teacher, manifesting itself in low class sizes (I usually taught two sections of 15 students, or less, per class) and nearly complete teacher autonomy.
Again, if student test scores are all that matter, that my students overwhelmingly scored 2s and 1s (throughout my years teaching AP, a score of 3 was considered “passing” because most colleges awarded college credit for 3s and above) suggested that my students, our program, and I were all failures.
The story, however, is something quite different. Over the years, we received countless messages from our students once they were in college: Our graduates eagerly and without prompting praised the opportunities they were given in high school, recognizing the tremendous base they carried into college because of their experiences in their AP courses.
Again, most of these students scored 2s on the AP exam. Not unusual was a former student contacting me to intervene with their freshman English college professor, who believed the student’s freshman essays were too good to be original.
To this day, my Facebook account is punctuated with the voices of former students echoing that somehow we had been successful in our classes. Let me emphasize that many of these students would have been excluded from AP if our school had used the gate-keeping mechanisms the College Board recommended.
Why were we successful, despite the evidence of the test scores?
• Access to a rich curriculum, student-centered classrooms, workshop environments, low student/teacher ratios.
• Teacher autonomy along with administrative, parent, and student support.
What are the real lessons?
• AP didn’t cause any of our success. [In fact, we took the framework of the AP template, but made it far more effective by meeting the needs of our students without regard for the simplistic outcomes associated with the test scores.]
• Test scores hide genuine academic success.
Ultimately, the College Board and Schneider are making the wrong arguments, in fact, a problem we are also facing with adoption of the CCSS (wrestling over if the standards are “rigorous” or how to implement them or what the tests should look like versus confronting the folly of standards- and test-based schooling).
Instead of reforming any specific program or policy, and instead of focusing on outcomes to judge if a program works or if a reform works, we must begin to seek and value an equitable access to rich educational experiences for all children, as Jones notes:
Interestingly, the very things that we’ve been arguing for decades that our schools desperately need, are the very things that the rich insist on in their schools: more resources, rich curriculum (not just reading and math), experienced teachers (not just grinding through newbies), and small class sizes!…
When it comes to meeting our students’ basic needs, they claim there’s no money. But when it comes to data gathering there’s a blank check. New York City is going to spend $32 million to pay Pearson to develop more tests over the next five years.
Teachers and schools, regardless of the quality of those teachers or the courses students are offered, will never alone overcome the inequity of children’s lives, particularly if we look at the numbers instead of the people involved and especially if we are not patient, expecting some instant evidence of success.
Most of the success I do recognize (along with the many mistakes weaved in among that eventual success) has come into view only many years later. And for my students who trace something positive to my classroom, I would caution that they should also look in the mirror and recognize the dozens of other related experiences that create the momentum that leads to success.
Henry David Thoreau wrote, “One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.”
This is one of many Thoreau quotes that grew yellow on my classroom walls. While I believed it was a powerful message for my students, often frozen as they were by their own society-imposed rush to be perfect immediately (or prove themselves the failures they feared they were), I am more convinced than ever that Thoreau is speaking to the world of education reform.
It is not ours to do everything, but the something is pretty clear, and that something must include a commitment to creating equitable opportunities for all children, and that equity must be wrapped in kindness and patience.
In time, these students will become adults who remember those opportunities as well as that kindness and patience but not their AP scores or their college GPA.
Journal of Educational Controversy – Review: Police in the Hallways: Confronting the “Culture of Control”
My review ends:
Broadly, then, Nolan’s Police in the Hallways forces the reader to consider how the line between the police state in and out of school has become blurred in some children’s lives. It is a harsh lesson about how middle-class norms mask a cultural willingness to subject other people’s children (Delpit, 2006) to institutional policies and messages that no middle-class or affluent parents would accept for their own children:
In a grossly inequitable school system and stratified society, punitive urban school disciplinary policies serve the interests of the white middle and wealthy classes, as poor youth of color are demonized through the discourses of zero tolerance and subjected to heavy policing. (Kindle Locations 2391-2392)
Conservative Leadership Poor Stewardship of Public Funds
In South Carolina and across the U.S., conservative leadership of education reform has failed to fulfill a foundational commitment to traditional values, good stewardship of public funds. [1]
The evidence of that failed stewardship is best exposed in commitments to three education reform policies: Adopting and implementing Common Core State Standards (CCSS), designing and implementing new tests based on CCSS, and proposing and field-testing revised teacher evaluations based on value-added models (VAM).
SC committed a tremendous amount of time and public funding to the accountability movement thirty years ago as one of the first states to implement state standards and high-stakes testing. After three decades of accountability, SC, like every other state in the union, has declared education still lacking and thus once again proposes a new round of education reform primarily focusing on, yet again, accountability, standards, and high-stakes testing.
Several aspects of committing to CCSS, new high-stakes tests, and teacher evaluation reform that are almost absent from the political and public debate are needs and cost/benefit analyses of these policies.
More of the Same Failed Policies?
If thirty years of accountability has failed, why is more of the same the next course of reform? If thirty years of accountability has failed, shouldn’t SC and other states first clearly establish what the problems and goals of education are before committing to any policies aimed at solving those problems or meeting those goals?
Neither of these questions have been adequately addressed, yet conservative political leadership is racing to commit a tremendous amount of public funding and public workers’ time to CCSS, an increase in high-stakes testing never experienced by any school system, and teacher evaluations proposals based on discredited test-based metrics.
Just as private corporations have reaped the rewards of tax dollars in SC during the multiple revisions of our accountability system, moving through at least three versions of tests and a maze of reformed state standards, the only guaranteed outcomes of commitments to CCSS, new tests, and reformed teacher evaluations are profits for textbook companies, test designers, and private consultants—all of whom have already begun cashing in on branding materials with CCSS and the yet-to-be designed high-stakes tests that will eventually be implemented twice a year in every class taught in the state.
SC as a state and as an education system is burdened by one undeniable major problem, inequity of opportunities in society and in schools spurred by poverty.
Numerous studies in recent years have shown that schools across the U.S. tend to reflect and perpetuate inequity; thus, children born into impoverished homes and communities are disproportionately attending schools struggling against and mirroring the consequences of poverty.
Commitments in SC to CCSS, new high-stakes tests, and reforming teacher evaluations based in large part on those new tests are at their core poor stewardship of public funding in a state that has many more pressing issues needing the support of state government.
A further problem with conservative leadership endorsing these education reforms is that much of the motivation for CCSS, new test, and reforming teacher evaluations comes from funding mandates by the federal government.
Misguided education reform is not only a blow to conservative economics but also a snub to traditional trust in local government over federal control.
Recently, as well, a special issue on VAM from Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA) includes two analyses that should give policy makers in SC and all states key financial reasons to pause if not halt commitments to education reform based on student test scores—the potential for legal action from a variety of stakeholders in education.
Baker, Oluwole, and Green explain: “Overly prescriptive, rigid teacher evaluation mandates, in our view, are likely to open the floodgates to new litigation over teacher due process rights. This is likely despite the fact that much of the policy impetus behind these new evaluation systems is the reduction of legal hassles involved in terminating ineffective teachers.”
Further, Pullin warns: “For public policymakers, there are strong reasons to suggest that high-stakes implementation of VAM is, at best, premature and, as a result, the potential for successful legal challenge to its use is high. The use of VAM as a policy tool for meaningful education improvement has considerable limitations, whether or not some judges might consider it legally defensible.”
Do schools across SC need education reform? Yes, just as social policy in the state needs to address poverty as a key mechanism for supporting those schools once they are reformed.
But in a state driven by traditional values and conservative political leadership, current commitments to CCSS, new high-stakes tests, and reforming teacher evaluations are neither educationally sound nor conservative.
[1] Expanded version of Op-Ed published in The State (Columbia, SC), March 8, 2013: “Conservatives poor stewards of education funds”
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 